It started with the holidays, all lined up on the calendar in a neat row. That’s when we began to let ourselves go. They gave us the excuse to overeat, and that dovetailed with a transition into a season of heartier foods. The chilis. The stews. “The apple pies, instead of the apples,” as Jennifer Nelson, director of clinical dietetics at the Mayo Clinic, puts it. “They cook a lot of tacos, hamburgers, and hamburger helper,” adds Alaa Naimi, of Thrifty Scot Supermarket in winter-battered Detroit. “People get stuff to make big meals.”

Strike one.

The holidays also made us break our gym routine, helped along by the creeping darkness outside. Here’s the wintertime trajectory of a gym-goer, as Mark Merchant—our go-to fitness guy and co-owner of As One Fitness in New York City—has seen it for years now: A week or two before Thanksgiving, when the light changes, people just head right into maintenance mode. But with the holidays, they can’t even maintain. Then they reach New Year’s. “They’re excited, and they’re doing their best—so they’re trying to get back on, and they’re trying to straighten out all that’s happened in the last eight weeks,” Merchant says. “But then winter drags on, another month or two,” and they—we—drop off.

Strike two.

And then we feel like shit about how things got this way, and that causes us to double down. “When people start thinking negatively, like Oh, I blew it or I’m weak, you get this negative spiral that can exacerbate the excuses, the bad habits, the continuing negative self-talk,” says Nelson.

Aaaand...strike three.

So we’ve collected an assortment of tips and wisdom to help you drag yourself through, and get back to where you were before November. Because the sun is finally coming back, and we heard birds chirping the other day.

—Nate Hopper

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Strategy No. 1: Sound the Alarm

Monday through Thursday, at nine at night, an alarm goes off on my iPhone, flashing a message that I read from that unflattering vantage that can only be achieved by holding a phone above your face while splayed out on a couch encircled by the remains of last night’s snack: a shameful half loaf of cinnamon raisin bread.

I have a soft spot for money. Too soft—the kind of spot that leads me to feel legitimate frustration after overestimating my needs at a parking meter. And while such cheapness is not the best trait for most areas of my life, it’s changed the way I exercise.

A few months ago, I joined a gym that charges an obscene membership fee: $230 per month. That’s a big chunk of my income. More than it should be. But it’s working...

Four twenty-or-so minute workout cycles, relayed to us by Mark Merchant, our go-to fitness guy and co-owner of As One Fitness in New York City. He recommends you shorten your workout cycle while winter lingers (he himself does it) — just because it packs in a lot of workout and makes you feel great, but doesn't take so long (which is hard to slog through when you've got the winter blues). Do the first two on, say, Monday and Tuesday. Take a day or two. Then do the other pair. Take whatever is left in the week. Take five second breaks between each set. Do it again and again and again and again.

I’ve long been a gym-goer, but recently I convinced my wife to start coming with me. Now going to the gym together is a significant part of the quality time we get to spend together, especially during this horrifying winter in which our other options include hibernating in a cave, and huddling around a can fire inside our frozen apartment.

Aside from the social aspect, going to the gym with your significant other is a great way to keep each other motivated. Not that we actually work out together once we’re there, mind you. There are only three things a person should do completely alone in life: work out, defecate, and meet his maker. Unless you’re some kind of powerlifter, working out with a partner is a tremendous waste of time—both yours and that of the breadline of people waiting for you two to relinquish the piece of equipment you’ve been protecting for an hour like a sweaty security guard. But working out at a distance from your spouse? There’s nothing quite so fulfilling as catching a glimpse of a woman working out across the room, checking her out for a moment, then realizing it’s your wife...

Every year or two, depending on how badly we’ve all gone to seed, a group of friends and I hold a competition to see who can lose more weight in a certain amount of time: a month, sometimes two months, by total pounds and percentage of body weight. We show up at a friend’s place, put money down, weigh in, and are given new nicknames based on our reactions to the numbers on the scale. Nicknames such as “Oh God,” and “No Way.” Then we skulk home in the cold, to our new lives of strict self-denial.

It sounds god-awful, but it isn’t. The key to a life of self-denial, especially when ever fiber of your being is howling insanely for chili, cheeseburgers, burritos, and pizza all hours of every short, miserable day, is to download a calorie counter. This is a necessary corrective to the fact—addressed in Brian Wansink’s book Mindless Eating—that human beings are basically dogs. If there is food there, we will eat it all, even if it makes us sick...

These cold and dark months pain me. They’re grim, enervating, and agonizing, and they feel as if they might never end. I begin to feel that I’m living in Westeros, where the winter can last twenty years or more—and that’s without being attacked by ice zombies.

When my life force is almost extinguished by this kind of weather, only one thing will keep me alive: reckless, shameless, orgiastic self-indulgence...